Granddad liked to draw with me. When my father was in Occupied Japan with the Army, Mom and I stayed with her parents in Southern California. That’s probably the time Granddad and I drew together. Maybe not the only time. I don’t remember a lot of back then, as I was only two, going on three. But I feel there is truth to much of what I heard. I sort of remember his large hand patting my back, giving my hair a mess-up, and then calling Mom and Grandma over to see what I did.

Portrait of my Dad, drawn when I was 7                                      Pencil and paper

 Dad came home  from the Korean War badly wounded. The best thing was, the three of us were together again. I started school in Central California, and a few years later we moved north to be closer to Dad’s family in Southern Oregon. As far as I know, Granddad died a year or so after that. The folks did not talk to me about it. I went to stay with my Aunt May and Uncle Ivan on their farm in Looking-glass, while Mom and Dad drove south to attend the funeral.

   The relationship between Granddad and me was not very current by then. We saw one another rarely.  Once or twice, while he was still alive, the folks and I would go down Highway 99, from our home near Roseburg, to Menlo Park or Hayward, where Mom’s siblings lived – and all my cousins. The grandparents would drive up from Santa Barbara and we’d have Easter or Thanksgiving. Granddad and I may have sketched together those few times. If so, Mom would have commented to the Gathering that Granddad had been drawing with me since I was very little. She would have said that the two of us “go off into our own world” when we are together. Granddad and I sat side by side at the table, “just going to town”, as Mom would say.

   Grandmother lived on for several more years. I remember her coming around occasionally after my brother was born, even as he started school, which is when I left grammar school to enter junior high. At my junior high school in Southern Oregon there was a very good arts curriculum. I took classes in pottery and copper enameling. We moved a couple of times before I finished high school. Dad was often restless. My Junior year of high school was spent in Northern Oregon, where I showed my drawings to an administrator and was accepted into the arts program for the following year. However, before that happened, we moved on to Southern Washington, and I entered a school that did not have drawing or painting classes. That turned out to be fine with me. I was busy enough painting stage settings, and contributing to the steady stream of butcher paper pep rally banners my senior year.

  A business minor in community college was something I “could someday fall back on”.  Mom again. I took Art to practice art.  Business proved to be terribly dull and simplistic to my highly charged imagination and romantic sensibility. I switched to Literature as a minor, realizing how much I love stories. My Dad had a little bit to do with this decision. I grew up listening to his stories. I learned that he was at least a 2nd generation storyteller. And when his war wound limited his physical activity, he took the time and had the ambition to turn to writing professionally.

  Upon my return from a drafted enrollment in the Army, and fortified by the G.I. Bill, I became an Art major at a state college in Northwest Washington. As I advanced to and through my senior year, Drawing became my favorite subject. I took a number of classes from the dynamic Robert Jensen. It was his “Inventive Drawing” class that became the final class of my final year at college.

  A student of geology and I shared an A-framed house then. It was far from the hustle and glitter of the college and city. We lived beside a lake in the woods. It was mostly quiet and we were somewhat isolated. We went out on the nearby road and tried to hitch-hike when the car would not start. Some mornings a woodpecker came and had a go at our roof. The nights were dark, with only the sounds of wildlife like owls and frogs.

  I had been producing graphite drawings of trees and forests. The pencil seemed to be good for only intricate stuff. That kind of bugged me. I could articulate the details of boughs and leaves, twisting branches and roots, boulders or splashing water with my pencil, but when it came to sky, clouds, or broad surfaces where I thought cross-hatch shading would further actualize the scene, it never worked; the overall ‘light’ began to choke.

  ‘And this style is all too freaking tedious for me!’ I fumed, exasperated. It was the night before the final critique of my college career. However much I wanted to moan about it, I would be required to stay up late finishing  my project.

  I occupied the upper part of the “A” in our A-frame. The peak of the house was just above my head. In my work space the ceiling angled away to each side of my table. I relied on an elbowed office lamp for light. The paper was a heavy, cotton base Arches. The pencil; probably a 5B. The picture was half the way finished. The roommate was gone for the night, so there was nobody around but me. I settled in to advance my pencil-dance across  the soft, snow white surface, as snow white as a 60 watt incandescent could make it. As I worked, I thought the thoughts of my sort of 25 year old self.

   Out of nowhere, beyond any reason or rhyme I had, I was suddenly aware of a head hovering next to mine, its face I immediately recognized to be Granddad. It was like he was bending to look at my work, or working on his own drawing next to mine. The instant I pulled together what was happening, as heart stopping alarm passed through me, the apparition was gone.

  Makes one wonder. I finished the piece and presented all my work on time the following day. It was a hit! No one had seen anything like that from me before. Jensen got excited about it. Not much time after that, I teamed with a fellow art student, Susan Waldron, and we hung our work in the school’s gallery. One of my pieces was selected for purchase for the college’s collection.

    Even more unforgettable was the visit, apparently from Granddad, that I had during the night before the critique. By that time, I barely remembered the man. Yet I recognized him right away, as if we were fresh from the past. I decided Granddad didn’t mean to be spooky.  I think I experienced his influence in a pure form by this encounter. Interesting question: How much can he take charge of my work? He is an ancestor, so his claims on me are not deniable. Nevertheless, he, or both of us, seem to live where perpetuation of idea thrives, and he, or we, decided to meet at that particular moment. Summarily, this suggests the possibility of a rich and different spin to the title, “Granddad Liked to Draw with Me.”

Poster I designed for the show

By early ought-four, Amy was married to a gentleman from the prospering field of high technology. Her new husband was transferred to his employer’s London office, and the couple established residence in Windsor, a half hour train ride east. Near that time, our youngest, Christopher, and his girlfriend, Erica, went to live in Edinburgh, Scotland. A graduate of culinary school, Chris had acquired a youth work permit for the United Kingdom and had been working at an Italian restaurant in the city for a several months. Encouraged by our children to visit them, Kathleen and I found someone to care for our pets, packed our bags, and headed for the UK for a two week vacation.

In Edinburgh one morning we rented a car. With Chris and Erica, the four of us crowded into a new compact Ford. It was late in the kid’s stay in Scotland. They had endured a rough winter. Rougher, they said, than any they had experienced in the Pacific Northwest. Now in the first twinkling of Spring, they were eager to move on. They were free to explore the countryside.

The Ford had a manual stick-shift using the familiar sequence. But with the steering wheel on the right side of the car, the shifting had to be done with the left hand. More awkward than that; we needed to drive on the left side of the road. Chris and Erica, yet minors, were prohibited by the rental agreement to get behind the wheel. So the driving was up to Kathleen and me. A straw was drawn, and it was me to start us out. Out of the city, along a bit of freeway before pulling off to a secondary highway and handing it over to her. I feared that I had already had enough.

Soon we were rolling along an asphalt ribbon, up through hills geometrically coated in tree farms. A river would sparkle on one side of the road awhile, then the other. One issue we had, aggravating both Kathleen and myself; the line of cars pressing into the rear view mirror. Here we were, rushing along the little highway, seemingly no larger than your or my driveway, with wild abandon, and everyone back there was able to keep up with us, and, not only that, they were implying  that we should go faster.

It was afternoon when we began entering the Highlands. The scenery became more awesome. The road became more ours. I was at the wheel again, driving in wide open country, along a road ever more empty of traffic. Heavy, granite blue clouds scraped over jagged black peaks just out our windows. They dropped sheets of rain onto snow fields one could measure by the square mile. In the distance one could see it would be more of the same to the horizon; the immense, presumably silent, space above the still, massively rumpled land, an unmade bed part of Earth. It got me somewhere in my heart. There were turnouts, often at the end of a slow, steady climb, and I was compelled to pull us aside for another look, another inhale of that air, and while my companions stretched their legs, I ran about with my arms flung wide open to embrace another enormous scene, declaring my allegiance to this place with ever increasing drama.

The evening sort of sneaked up on us. We suddenly felt ourselves in a tiny ship on a vast, less-than-friendly ocean. The light purpled and blued. At the final viewpoint I got out alone, took a big look at the lengthening shadows, got back into our Ford and quickly shut the door. It was getting cold. Then I noticed that Kathleen had gone into emotional neutral, while in back they appeared to be fuming.

Okay, we haven’t the slightest idea where we will be spending the night. But what really is the problem?

Chris spoke for the back seat. All day he and Erica had felt trapped in the back of the car. They had watched the mad swirl out the windshield, not sure what we’d do first; drive into a cold river or dash head-on into oncoming traffic. No, it didn’t help, either, to come to the end of the day out in the middle of nowhere. He and Erica had decided the other plan would have been better. That would have had us taking the train for the West Coast, then ferrying on out to the islands.

It was Kathleen who insisted on us getting the car. She repeated her case; that we’d enjoy the comfort and convenience, and have the freedom to go anywhere we want. Maybe it was a mistake to have come North, though, if that’s the way everybody felt.

I turned in my seat as well as I could in order to face the children. Chris is six three and Erica is fair sized. They were jammed together at their hips and shoulders, were partially unfolded out into the available space left by the softer of our luggage, that which overflowed from the trunk.

I stated what I thought had been apparent earlier; that there were always cars on our butt. There was usually no place to pull over. Those people behind us wanted us to go faster and faster. And my other point: If Mom hadn’t rented us the car, and we hadn’t come North, then I – for one – would not have gotten to see this place. I summed up by saying, yes, I was having fun. Then I asked if anyone thought it counted when I was having fun.

That part of the conversation ended here. To wit, we urgently needed to proceed to the first warm meal and shelter we could find, especially while there was daylight. We rode West, then North into the violet air. We descended, while the mountains began to ridge and the great sweeps of land between them deepened into steep walled valleys. The grand patches of snow disappeared and the valleys filled with water. We drove along the shore of a lake. There was no longer anyone on the road but us. We still had the light. In March, perhaps, the twilight lingers reliably, enough for the dalliers to find home.

Soon, we spotted a house. It was slate roofed, two stories of white-washed stone, set in the embrace of several large, leafless trees. Lamplight warmed the downstairs. A sign at the road read that it was an inn. Up the creaky wooden stairs inside, to the second floor, there were five vacant bedrooms, of which we were cheerfully rented two. Downstairs and in the back was the dining room. There, two men and a young woman played pool. They lived nearby, and spoke barely understandable English. The four of us sat with our meals, our dark brews, finally content. Out our window, notably, daylight remained. In view, beyond some fields, between us and the failing mauve face of a rugged mountain, was the formidable liquid body of the Loch Ness, the lair of the monster.